Tuesday's Twitterings

N ewslicious. Finally, I know how to get where I'm going, thanks to the new Google Maps. Friedleib F. Runge, father of paper chromatography, was born on this day in 1795. Science fiction author Jules Verne was born in Nantes, France, 1828.

1. Watch out Intel and AMD. Forget the G5. IBM, Sony and Toshiba unveiled details yesterday of a new microprocessor that contains the equivalent of eight CPU cores around a central coordinating core based on PowerPC. The Cell processor, in development since 2001, starts at over 4 gigahertz, has nearly twice the transistors of the Pentium 4 and can deliver 10 times the performance. Look for it in the new Sony Playstation 3, TVs from Toshiba, and IBM high-end workstation computers coming later this year. Apparently there are several operating systems already running on the Cell in the labs, including Linux. With its PowerPC heritage, it shouldn't be hard to port OS X to it - now that would be a killer product.
2. The FCC released a list of web sites that send cell phone spam on Monday. The sites have 30 days to stop or face fines of $11,000 per violation.
3. The Superbowl spurred the sales of 1.4 million TVs according to the TV Retail Advertising and Marketing Association, many of them high-end flat screens.
4. Microsoft will release 13 patches for Windows XP today, including nine critical updates. Make sure to run Windows Update.
5. But don't believe an email claiming to be from Microsoft with an attached "security" program. It's spyware from Romania, one of many scams circulating the net right now taking advantage of Microsoft's announced "Windows Genuine Advantage" program. Microsoft says it never sends out updates via email.
6. The record industry has hit a new low. They're suing a dead woman. According to her daughter, the 83-year-old West Virginia woman hated computers. According to the RIAA, she traded 700 pop, rap, and rock songs online under the screen name smittenedkitten. The RIAA says they'll drop the case.
7. University of Calgary students will be learning how to create spam and spyware. The university already has a course on virus creation. Now why didn't they teach that kind of stuff when I was in school. Oh, yeah. Because you can't create spam with a slide rule.